"There's no conversation. I'm not interested in having to explain myself. I'm just using people on the street in the most transitory way." - Mark Cohen
Over the past 40 years Mark Cohen has walked the length and breadth of the streets in and around his hometown, seizing-or rather extracting-fragments of gestures, postures and bodies. In his photos we see headless torsos, smiling children, willing subjects yet still frighteningly vulnerable, thinly sketched limbs and coats worn like protective cloaks. Thus Mark Cohen slices and sculpts the very thick of the world to impose, in successive touches,a Kafkaesque vision, ruthless and poetic, of an environment that encompasses him. A vision from within.
This remarkable body of work-Cohen rarely uses the viewfinder, holding the camera at arm's length-is rooted in impulsions that last just fractions of a second. A disconcerting strangeness emanates from his subjects, some caught in the dazzle of the flash. Bodies seem uncomfortable, threatened, lost, grinning too wildly or reduced to their erotic dimension. Ordinary objects appear isolated, mysterious, sinister. The decline of this small mining town is right there, in its yards, at its bus stops, on its porches, but Mark Cohen's intentions are anything but documentary. Repetitive to the verge of obsession, he has no idea what brought him there or what he hopes to find. Rather he is driven by the beauty of a chance encounter, by the torments or delights he detects in another's substance. There is, in the brutality of his gaze, a rawness and a nervous energy, an ambivalence and a grace through which the making of a photo becomes the expression of a revelation.
"When you're trying to make a new object, you've got to make something happen. And you learn to read people's reactions quickly." - Mark Cohen
Mark Cohen was born in 1943 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. A self-taught photographer since 1958, Mark Cohen’s self-titled“grab shots” came to the attention of the photography world in1973 when he had a solo-show at the Museum of Modern Art, NewYork. Working as a commercial photographer to supplement his work as an artist, Cohen has also taught photography at Princeton University, Wilkes College and Kings College.
Writes Vince Aletti inThe Village Voice, “Cohen’s black-and-white photos... are deliberately disconcerting, almost vulgar... Heads are cropped out of the frame; truncated hands, legs and arms loom monstrously into view; perspective warps. Cohen wasn’t alone in his harsh, comic view of down-home America, but his in-your-face take and fragmentary results were jarringly unique, and much imitated.”
Cohen still lives and works in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Selected Collections:
Whitney Museum of American Art, NY
Museum of Modern Art, NY
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA